The use of documents in an electronic format (electronic documents) has become increasingly popular for a variety of reasons. First, electronic documents provide a convenient format for storing information because electronic documents may be easily shared with others and do not degrade over time. Second, the type of documents that may be stored electronically has grown with the expanding field of software applications. Third, documents stored electronically lend themselves to be stored more cheaply and efficiently in the aggregate than traditional physical storage.
It remains advantageous, however, to obtain physical copies of electronic documents. For example, physically documents allow the documents to exist independently from an electronic medium. Thus, in situations where a computerized display is either inconvenient or unavailable, there is no substitute for having the physical document at hand. Also, many people prefer to minimize the amount of time spent reviewing electronic documents on computerized displays for purposes of reducing eyestrain.
Electronic documents are typically printed by issuing a print command to a printer driver in a software application responsible for rendering the electronic document. A printer driver acts like a translator between a printer and the programming entities interacting with the printer. For example, a printer driver accepts generic commands from the software application and translates the generic commands into specialized commands understood by the printer to enable to printer to print the electronic document. A portion of the generic commands that a printer driver may accept from the software application may include receiving print specification data, which is data that indicates how the electronic document is desired to be printed by a user.
Printers, which are devices that are capable of printing physical copies of electronic documents, may either have a single output bin or multiple output bins. An output bin is a tray coupled to a printer that collects documents printed by the printer. While printers with one output bin are common, a printer with multiple output bins may be advantageous when the printer services numerous clients or otherwise prints a large volume of electronic documents. A client is any computerized device that is capable of issuing a print command through a software application.
Software applications, with the assistance of a printer driver, may be used to specify a particular printer to print an electronic document. For example, a user that issues a print command through the software application may instruct a printer driver to print an electronic document using print specification data that specifies a particular printer to print the document. The print specification data may also include a particular output bin on a particular printer to receive the printed documents. However, while an electronic document may be printed to a particular bin in a multiple output bin printer, the current approaches fail to support printing an electronic document to multiple printers or to multiple output bins on a single printer with a single print command.
A variety of disparate people may have need to access printed physical copies of the same electronic document, and they may not be physically located in close proximity to each other. For example, people in different departments within a company may wish to review the same physical document, but each department may be located in a different building.
Current approaches attempt to address these problems by allowing users to issue multiple print commands through software applications, i.e., manually printing a first set of copies to a first destination, and subsequently manually printing a second set of copies to a second destination. For each print command issued, the user is required to submit a new set of print specification data. This results in wasted time and frustration for the user. By increasing the redundancy of the printing process, there is also an increased chance of mistake, as the user may submit an incorrect or unintended set of printing specifications due to a typographical error or the user being unsure of what set of printing specifications have already been submitted. Accordingly, there is an unaddressed need in the art to provide copies of electronic documents to multiple output mechanisms while avoiding the problems associated with issuing multiple print commands through software applications.